1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a home network, and more particularly, to a method and system for displaying status information about each device and delivering control information in a home network environment. This application is based on Korean Patent Application No. 2001-19941 filed Apr. 13, 2001, the entire disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference for all purposes.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, as various digital devices, such as digital TVs, digital VCRs, digital set-top boxes, etc., have emerged, digital features have been added to existing household electronic products such as refrigerators, washing machines, and microwave devices to couple them and form a home network environment. To control devices in a home network environment, functions for monitoring the status of various devices within a home network and delivering control commands at the request of a user are required. Typically, the home network uses middleware such as Jini, home audio/visual interoperability (Havi), or universal plug and play (UPnP), depending on the type of communication channels and the execution environment, such as an operating system of each device, and it requires an application program for interfacing with a user.
Since most devices used in the home network are household electronics products, they suffer from a large constraint on hardware resources for the home network itself and have no general usability in view of their limited operating system. Thus, in the home network environment, it is desired to minimize additional software resources required to run middleware and an application program that can perform a user interface function on a respective device. In particular, an embedded operating system used in a device within the home network not only is difficult to expand but also requires much cost in porting a new development or execution environment.
An application program for providing a user interface as well as functions for a conventional control point, receiving status information from a controlled device and transmitting a control command to the controlled device at the request of a user, is system dependent. Thus, the application program should be ported suitably for the operating system of the network system itself by using additional software resources. This incurs additional cost for devices on the home network.
Due to a resource constraint of the control point, the system has instability in graphic capabilities, in from time to time or periodically outputting status information about the controlled device by means of the application program, and it even tends to break down frequently.